Please join me in welcoming Orioles RHP Jason Hammel to the MLB.com Blogs community. Currently on the 15-day disabled list, Hammel just launched HammelTown, which promises to be an inside look at the life of a Major Leaguer’s world off the field. Notice that a certain Boston Terrier named Sadie is part of the blog’s header, so expect to see a lot of her along the way. Be sure to leave Jason comments and use the Share icons on the bottom of his Permalink post to help spread the word. (And by the way, make sure you activate the Share icons in the Settings of your WordPress.com dashboard like he did.)

It’s important that everyone can find your MLB.com Blog posts in social media, and unfortunately it requires a manual intervention by each blogger to add that capability to your blog. It’s really easy, and you are just losing traffic by not taking a moment to make it happen.

In your dashboard, go to Settings–>Sharing. Then just drag all of the Share icons and then hit Save. Then each of your individual posts (Permalink) will display those icons at the bottom, so that your readers can instantly share/email/print/etc. As admins, we’re going to be doing that immediately for all of the Latest Leaders (unless it’s already done) immediately after we post the new rankings.

Hope you guys are having as good a day as I am. This is one of my favorite times, when the first actual games are played between Major League teams for the first time since the World Series. As I wrote yesterday on MLB.com, we have launched our MLB.com At Bat 13 app, so we’re back for a fifth year with the best sports app ever and forever. I’m enjoying a Gameday Audio marathon, making too big a deal about Freddie Freeman registering the first hit of 2013, Tigers breaking their four-game skid vs. MLB opposition, Terry Francona’s new-look Indians overcoming a quick five-run deficit, etc. It just feels good to hear that crack of the bat and to let yourself settle into the flow of a baseball game, instead of just talking about it. Did you know it’s the earliest the KC Royals ever played a first game?

So while I am listening and readying for our first MLB.TV live games this weekend, I thought it would be a good time to surface the most recently updated MLB.com Blogs and give you a look at some bloggers who may be familiar or brand-new to you. In addition to this list below, be sure to get acquainted with our PRO Blogs roster. I appreciate all your recent comments here, and please keep it up, always adding your blog’s full URL so others can easily find you. We’ll be relaunching http://MLB.com/blogs in the near future, TBA.

Matthew Leach sits right here next to me at the MLB.com HQ in NYC and he also was the first of our MLB.com reporters to start an MLB.com Blog, Obviously You’re Not a Golfer, back in 2005. He has done a lot of things first for us, so it wasn’t a surprise to me that he just became the first person to actually start listing all the possible Division Series matchups. There are at least 53 by his count, which is a pretty graphic way of showing just how out-of-control intense these final days are going to be, right through another final Wednesday, any possible play-in tiebreakers, and the first-ever Wild Card playoff games in both leagues. Take a look at his list and see if you’re team’s on it, check out Matthew’s columns, and while you’re at it, read my story about Best Night Ever, share it on Facebook and Twitter, and say a Happy Birthday to a sequence of 2011 games that made most of us scream.

Who’s ready for an unbelievable finish to this regular season, and who’s posting about it?

Stay tuned for the MLB.com Latest Leaders for September after the weekend…and thanks to everyone for the great response to our callout to be part of our brand-new series, “Meet the Bloggers.” Many of you already have left comments here requesting to be featured with a Q&A, and right now the main priority is seeing who we can interview on camera out at the ballpark — while the ballparks are still open! Let me know in the comments if you are planning to be at any of the MLB ballparks between now and the end of the regular season. We probably can do some during the Postseason but it will be more hectic then. See previous post for more.

Welcome to SABR prez and Diamond Dollar$ author Vince Gennaro, and welcome back to our longtime friend Curt Smith, the foremost authority on baseball broadcasters and author of many books plus the Voices of the Game blog. . . . Hope you have said hello to Camille Campins Adams, wife of Yankees prospect David Adams and author of a good baseball-wife blog. . . . Giants outfielder Gregor Blanco just posted about his dad . . . Mitch Williams blogs about the Phillies’ chances of getting into the postseason despite the miserable first half. And the way the Phillies are suddenly playing, you might want to listen . . . Want to be in this space? Leave a comment with your full URL so we can help other bloggers find you.

Like this:

Thanks for the comments pertaining to new ads on MLB.com Blogs. We care incredibly about all of our bloggers, about you. Since the launch back in April 2005 — between those drought-busting titles by the Red Sox and White Sox, before “social media” was a term — we have made numerous enhancements to make this fun and easy-to-use in functionality, style and exposure to grow your audiences. Most recently, we partnered with WordPress.com in an extensive migration, giving you a state-of-the-art MLB.com blog platform, whether on a computer or a mobile device.

For those who might not know the history of MLB.com/blogs, we originally launched as a premium service. That paid subscription model was eliminated after the first season. For a while, there was a standard ad on the bottom right panel, mostly forgotten since it was positioned so low. As noted Tuesday, it has now become necessary to slightly adjust the blog layout for our standard run-of-site advertising you always have seen throughout the MLB.com portal, of which these blogs always have been a part. This offsets escalating hosting costs and allows us to keep offering this free service for you, where you always have had exclusive rights to use official MLB logos and marks within your content.

As for a few who asked, there is not an opportunity to share ad revenue. As a point of comparison, many standard social platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, do not share ad revenue with users from the content they create. We understand if some bloggers would prefer an ad-free environment, but in order to continue offering MLB.com Blogs at no cost, including site ads is necessary.

We understand it can be jarring to have a sudden change on your blog, which you see as your personal space. We will try in the future to communicate any changes in advance, wherever possible. Hopefully the next additions you will see will be the option for additional MLB themes, and that is something we currently are working on. I’ll let you know when I have an update on that front…and be on the lookout because our first-ever MLB.com Blogs Midseason Leaders are on the way here. Thanks – Mark

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Landed today in Kansas City and will be working our Major League Baseball All-Star Week here through Tuesday. Please be sure to leave comments here with any of your posts related to the Midsummer Classic, and make sure you checked out our June Latest Leaders in the previous post. It was immediately to the barbecue and keeping up with Final Vote…

Congrats to Matt Cain of the Giants for throwing the 22nd Perfect Game in Major League Baseball history. You can easily embed the MLB.com video of the masterpiece on your blog, to go with any posts about the game.

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Just go here and then click Embed and paste that code into your WordPress.com dashboard text field.

The most perfect blog post of all may have just been saved by Giants outfielder Gregor Blanco. His unreal diving catch toward the warning track preserved the gem, and you’ll want to see what he says in White Shark. Blanco invites your comments there and will be answering questions in future posts, so hit him up! This is the video he embedded the morning after history happened at AT&T Park:

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Fan “CHP” just commented on the White Shark’s blog entry:

“You brought me to your blog and this amazing post. This post led me, in my continuing post game Giants-haze, to not stop reading until I had finished everything you had written since becoming a Giant. You are amazingly well spoken, smart, and seem to be a pretty awesome person.”

One of our most popular PRO blogs here at MLB.com Blogs is SF Giants Photos, and props to the crew there for such thorough photo coverage of Cain’s perfecto. Take a look at their shots and leave comments and share their post.

Feel free to add comments here with your full URL if you are blogging about that game. Or just let us know what you are blogging about regarding any baseball topic.

You can also search WordPress.com for “Matt Cain” and you will come up with this list of fellow baseball bloggers like Girls are the New Boys or Your Cousin Vinnie. Make sure you use an MLB theme if you want to be tracked for the monthly Latest Leaders.

TRAFFIC TIP: Make sure you enable your viewers to share your posts in every way you want. In your WP Dashboard, go to Settings –> Sharing and then drag-and-drop all the icons like Twitter and FB and then save. That way other baseball fans can spread your blog posts everywhere. Default setting probably won’t do you much good.

We’re past the Memorial Day checkpoint of the season and the standings are becoming increasingly important to Major League Baseball fans. Fantasy owners are doing everything they can to put their teams in first place, as MLB.com Fantasy 411 was the top-ranked MLB Pro Blog for May. Zack Hample‘s milestone 50th stadium visit helped him claim the honors in the Fan division, while Carrie’s Muskat Ramblings topped the MLB.com Beat Writers en route to overall bragging rights with more traffic than any other MLB.com Blog. Congratulations to everyone who made the list!

There are many thousands of blogs in the MLB.com community, from players to Hall of Famers to groundskeepers to mascots to ballgirls to broadcasters to season-ticket holders and more. Want to see which ones are most popular? Here are your Latest Leaders ranked by page views from May 1-31:

Reminder: Blogs only can be tracked for this list if they use an MLB theme. If you switch to a different WordPress.com theme for a day or two during that month, those page views will not be included for these purposes because they cannot be recorded by MLB.com. Get yourself on this list by posting frequently and especially by commenting on a lot of these Latest Leaders blogs, always being sure to leave your full URL as a very clickable calling card. And don’t forget to embed MLB.com videos in your posts and make it more fun! You’re part of MLB.com as a blogger here, after all.

Meta

MLB.com/blogs Community

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